Jeff Weintraub

Commentaries and Controversies

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Nicholas Kristof - Does mass murder in Darfur upset anyone? (NYTimes)

Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.

So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions against Sudan, a no-fly zone, a freeze of Sudanese officials' assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by African and Arab countries to pressure Sudan, and an international force of African troops with financing and logistical support from the West.

But that's the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

The Secret Genocide Archive

Photos don't normally appear on this page. But it's time for all of us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.

These are just four photos in a secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan.

This African Union archive is classified, but it was shared with me by someone who believes that Americans will be stirred if they can see the consequences of their complacency.

The photo at the upper left was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I'm not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother.

The photo to the right shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.

At the lower left is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.

Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person's clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.

Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.

The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."

It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.

So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions against Sudan, a no-fly zone, a freeze of Sudanese officials' assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by African and Arab countries to pressure Sudan, and an international force of African troops with financing and logistical support from the West.

But that's the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

I'm sorry for inflicting these horrific photos on you. But the real obscenity isn't in printing pictures of dead babies - it's in our passivity, which allows these people to be slaughtered.

During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn't fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.

Monday, February 21, 2005

What Larry Summers didn't say

Both as a sociologist and as an ordinary concerned & curious citizen, I have been following the uproar over Larry Summers's remarks at the NBER conference with some perplexity. I don't know Summers, and I haven't been at Harvard for a while, so I don't have any personal stake in either defending or attacking him. And since I have always found the "rational actor" model pretty laughable, I am not shocked when such controversies (which belong, in large part, to the boundary-defining ritual processes that Durkheim summed up as "the positive function of crime" and that Kai Erikson later brought out so well) send people over the edge. But in this case, some of the things that have been said by people I know to be very bright and usually sensible have struck me as very puzzling (if not bizarre).

You and I don't know each other, but I generally find the stuff you write perceptive and level-headed. So I must confess I am baffled by the way you characterize the thrust of Summers's discussion.

The main point is the first step toward addressing what Matt properly calls “a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period” is — contrary to what Summers did in his remarks — to stop treating it as a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preferences.

Yes, people do that a lot (including, quite notoriously, economists). But that's simply not what Summers said in his remarks. To pick just one relevant passage:

Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I'll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance.

Maybe I'm just imagining things, but Summers appears to be doing the opposite of reducing "entrenched" social expectations to "a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preference." Summers asks here: "Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?" This appears to suggest that the socially structured "familial arrangements" are the key factor. All through this passage, the way Summers begins each point is to ask "is our society right to expect .... Is our society right to have familial arrangements ... Is our society right to ask ... ?"

Now, it's also true that Summers didn't put all his suggestions, speculations, and reflections in precisely this form. At other times, he's asking whether factors other than social arrangements might also play some role, including marginal differences between categories of people due to socialization or (a tricky point) genetics. But that's really the point. Whatever might be said for or against his social graces in other situations, in this particular context Summers was not handing down hard-and-fast conclusions but trying to frame open questions and alternative possibilities in thought-provoking (and sometimes provocative) ways. One can certainly criticize a lot of his points on various grounds--and I agree that some of them provided reasons for people to get upset (though not hysterical)--but (in my humble opinion) there is just no way that the thrust of his remarks fits your characterization. One doesn't have to agree with everything Summers said to notice this.

I offer these comments in a friendly spirit ... but, at the same time, as I say, with a certain sense of bafflement ... and, yes, even some disappointment.

Cheers,Jeff Weintraub

P.S. Unlike me, Brad DeLong does know Larry Summers, which could give him more insight into the matter or more potential for bias (or both). Be that as it may, his comments on this affair ("Academic Filters...") strike me as admirably calm, sensible, intelligent, and on target.

P.P.S. The arguments raised by Summers which suggest that different categories or groups of people might display significant statistical differences in specific aptitudes or inclinations at the high and low ends, even if the overall mean differences are slight, and that these differences could have noticeable consequences in some social contexts, may be right or wrong (and may or may not fit the cases to which he tried to apply it). But as long as it's not advanced as an Explanation of Everything, this is an intellectually quite respectable form of argument, which can't simply be dismissed a priori by a serious sociologist (or anyone else).

Leaving Larry Summers out of it for the moment, a user-friendly version of this argument, which has its shaky moments but is expressed in an engaging and perceptively thought-provoking way, was put forward in one of Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker articles from the 1990s:

The education of any athlete begins, in part, with an education in the racial taxonomy of his chosen sport-in the subtle, unwritten rules about what whites are supposed to be good at and what blacks are supposed to be good at. In football, whites play quarterback and blacks play running back; in baseball whites pitch and blacks play the outfield. I grew up in Canada, where my brother Geoffrey and I ran high-school track, and in Canada the rule of running was that anything under the quarter-mile belonged to the West Indians. This didn't mean that white people didn't run the sprints. But the expectation was that they would never win, and, sure enough, they rarely did. There was just a handful of West Indian immigrants in Ontario at that point-clustered in and around Toronto-but they owned Canadian sprinting, setting up under the stands at every major championship, cranking up the reggae on their boom boxes, and then humiliating everyone else on the track. My brother and I weren't from Toronto, so we weren't part of that scene. But our West Indian heritage meant that we got to share in the swagger. Geoffrey was a magnificent runner, with powerful legs and a barrel chest, and when he was warming up he used to do that exaggerated, slow-motion jog that the white guys would try to do and never quite pull off. I was a miler, which was a little outside the West Indian range. But, the way I figured it, the rules meant that no one should ever outkick me over the final two hundred metres of any race. And in the golden summer of my fourteenth year, when my running career prematurely peaked, no one ever did.

When I started running, there was a quarter-miler just a few years older than I was by the name of Arnold Stotz. He was a bulldog of a runner, hugely talented, and each year that he moved through the sprinting ranks he invariably broke the existing four-hundred-metre record in his age class. Stotz was white, though, and every time I saw the results of a big track meet I'd keep an eye out for his name, because I was convinced that he could not keep winning. It was as if I saw his whiteness as a degenerative disease, which would eventually claim and cripple him. I never asked him whether he felt the same anxiety, but I can't imagine that he didn't. There was only so long that anyone could defy the rules. One day, at the provincial championships, I looked up at the results board and Stotz was gone.

Talking openly about the racial dimension of sports in this way, of course, is considered unseemly. It's all right to say that blacks dominate sports because they lack opportunities elsewhere. That's the "Hoop Dreams" line, which says whites are allowed to acknowledge black athletic success as long as they feel guilty about it. What you're not supposed to say is what we were saying in my track days-that we were better because we were black, because of something intrinsic to being black. Nobody said anything like that publicly last month when Tiger Woods won the Masters or when, a week later, African men claimed thirteen out of the top twenty places in the Boston Marathon. Nor is it likely to come up this month, when African-Americans will make up eighty per cent of the players on the floor for the N.B.A. playoffs. When the popular television sports commentator Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder did break this taboo, in 1988- infamously ruminating on the size and significance of black thighs-one prominent N.A.A.C.P. official said that his remarks "could set race relations back a hundred years." The assumption is that the whole project of trying to get us to treat each other the same will be undermined if we don't all agree that under the skin we actually are the same.

The point of this, presumably, is to put our discussion of sports on a par with legal notions of racial equality, which would be a fine idea except that civil-rights law governs matters like housing and employment and the sports taboo covers matters like what can be said about someone's jump shot. In his much heralded new book "Darwin's Athletes," the University of Texas scholar John Hoberman tries to argue that these two things are the same, that it's impossible to speak of black physical superiority without implying intellectual inferiority. But it isn't long before the argument starts to get ridiculous. "The spectacle of black athleticism," he writes, inevitably turns into "a highly public image of black retardation." Oh, really? What, exactly, about Tiger Woods's victory in the Masters resembled "a highly public image of black retardation"? Today's black athletes are multimillion- dollar corporate pitchmen, with talk shows and sneaker deals and publicity machines and almost daily media opportunities to share their thoughts with the world, and it's very hard to see how all this contrives to make them look stupid. Hoberman spends a lot of time trying to inflate the significance of sports, arguing that how we talk about events on the baseball diamond or the track has grave consequences for how we talk about race in general. Here he is, for example, on Jackie Robinson:

The sheer volume of sentimental and intellectual energy that has been invested in the mythic saga of Jackie Robinson has discouraged further thinking about what his career did and did not accomplish. . . . Black America has paid a high and largely unacknowledged price for the extraordinary prominence given the black athlete rather than other black men of action (such as military pilots and astronauts), who represent modern aptitudes in ways that athletes cannot.

Please. Black America has paid a high and largely unacknowledged price for a long list of things, and having great athletes is far from the top of the list. Sometimes a baseball player is just a baseball player, and sometimes an observation about racial difference is just an observation about racial difference. Few object when medical scientists talk about the significant epidemiological differences between blacks and whites-the fact that blacks have a higher incidence of hypertension than whites and twice as many black males die of diabetes and prostate cancer as white males, that breast tumors appear to grow faster in black women than in white women, that black girls show signs of puberty sooner than white girls. So why aren't we allowed to say that there might be athletically significant differences between blacks and whites?

According to the medical evidence, African-Americans seem to have, on the average, greater bone mass than do white Americans-a difference that suggests greater muscle mass. Black men have slightly higher circulating levels of testosterone and human-growth hormone than their white counterparts, and blacks over all tend to have proportionally slimmer hips, wider shoulders, and longer legs. In one study, the Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin compared a group of Kenyan distance runners with a group of Swedish distance runners and found interesting differences in muscle composition: Saltin reported that the Africans appeared to have more blood-carrying capillaries and more mitochondria (the body's cellular power plant) in the fibres of their quadriceps. Another study found that, while black South African distance runners ran at the same speed as white South African runners, they were able to use more oxygen- eighty-nine per cent versus eighty-one per cent-over extended periods: somehow, they were able to exert themselves more. Such evidence suggested that there were physical differences in black athletes which have a bearing on activities like running and jumping, which should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who follows competitive sports.

To use track as an example-since track is probably the purest measure of athletic ability-Africans recorded fifteen out of the twenty fastest times last year in the men's ten-thousand- metre event. In the five thousand metres, eighteen out of the twenty fastest times were recorded by Africans. In the fifteen hundred metres, thirteen out of the twenty fastest times were African, and in the sprints, in the men's hundred metres, you have to go all the way down to the twenty-third place in the world rankings-to Geir Moen, of Norway-before you find a white face. There is a point at which it becomes foolish to deny the fact of black athletic prowess, and even more foolish to banish speculation on the topic. Clearly, something is going on. The question is what.

2.

If we are to decide what to make of the differences between blacks and whites, we first have to decide what to make of the word "difference," which can mean any number of things. A useful case study is to compare the ability of men and women in math. If you give a large, representative sample of male and female students a standardized math test, their mean scores will come out pretty much the same. But if you look at the margins, at the very best and the very worst students, sharp differences emerge. In the math portion of an achievement test conducted by Project Talent-a nationwide survey of fifteen-year-olds-there were 1.3 boys for every girl in the top ten per cent, 1.5 boys for every girl in the top five per cent, and seven boys for every girl in the top one per cent. In the fifty-six-year history of the Putnam Mathematical Competition, which has been described as the Olympics of college math, all but one of the winners have been male. Conversely, if you look at people with the very lowest math ability, you'll find more boys than girls there, too. In other words, although the average math ability of boys and girls is the same, the distribution isn't: there are more males than females at the bottom of the pile, more males than females at the top of the pile, and fewer males than females in the middle. Statisticians refer to this as a difference in variability.

This pattern, as it turns out, is repeated in almost every conceivable area of gender difference. Boys are more variable than girls on the College Board entrance exam and in routine elementary-school spelling tests. Male mortality patterns are more variable than female patterns; that is, many more men die in early and middle age than women, who tend to die in more of a concentrated clump toward the end of life. The problem is that variability differences are regularly confused with average differences. If men had higher average math scores than women, you could say they were better at the subject. But because they are only more variable the word "better" seems inappropriate.

The same holds true for differences between the races. A racist stereotype is the assertion of average difference-it's the claim that the typical white is superior to the typical black. It allows a white man to assume that the black man he passes on the street is stupider than he is. By contrast, if what racists believed was that black intelligence was simply more variable than white intelligence, then it would be impossible for them to construct a stereotype about black intelligence at all. They wouldn't be able to generalize. If they wanted to believe that there were a lot of blacks dumber than whites, they would also have to believe that there were a lot of blacks smarter than they were. This distinction is critical to understanding the relation between race and athletic performance. What are we seeing when we remark black domination of élite sporting events-an average difference between the races or merely a difference in variability?

This question has been explored by geneticists and physical anthropologists, and some of the most notable work has been conducted over the past few years by Kenneth Kidd, at Yale. Kidd and his colleagues have been taking DNA samples from two African Pygmy tribes in Zaire and the Central African Republic and comparing them with DNA samples taken from populations all over the world. What they have been looking for is variants-subtle differences between the DNA of one person and another-and what they have found is fascinating. "I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population-a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together," Kidd told me. In a sample of fifty Pygmies, for example, you might find nine variants in one stretch of DNA. In a sample of hundreds of people from around the rest of the world, you might find only a total of six variants in that same stretch of DNA-and probably every one of those six variants would also be found in the Pygmies. If everyone in the world was wiped out except Africans, in other words, almost all the human genetic diversity would be preserved.

The likelihood is that these results reflect Africa's status as the homeland of Homo sapiens: since every human population outside Africa is essentially a subset of the original African population, it makes sense that everyone in such a population would be a genetic subset of Africans, too. So you can expect groups of Africans to be more variable in respect to almost anything that has a genetic component. If, for example, your genes control how you react to aspirin, you'd expect to see more Africans than whites for whom one aspirin stops a bad headache, more for whom no amount of aspirin works, more who are allergic to aspirin, and more who need to take, say, four aspirin at a time to get any benefit-but far fewer Africans for whom the standard two-aspirin dose would work well. And to the extent that running is influenced by genetic factors you would expect to see more really fast blacks-and more really slow blacks-than whites but far fewer Africans of merely average speed. Blacks are like boys. Whites are like girls.

There is nothing particularly scary about this fact, and certainly nothing to warrant the kind of gag order on talk of racial differences which is now in place. What it means is that comparing élite athletes of different races tells you very little about the races themselves. A few years ago, for example, a prominent scientist argued for black athletic supremacy by pointing out that there had never been a white Michael Jordan. True. But, as the Yale anthropologist Jonathan Marks has noted, until recently there was no black Michael Jordan, either. Michael Jordan, like Tiger Woods or Wayne Gretzky or Cal Ripken, is one of the best players in his sport not because he's like the other members of his own ethnic group but precisely because he's not like them-or like anyone else, for that matter. Élite athletes are élite athletes because, in some sense, they are on the fringes of genetic variability. As it happens, African populations seem to create more of these genetic outliers than white populations do, and this is what underpins the claim that blacks are better athletes than whites. But that's all the claim amounts to. It doesn't say anything at all about the rest of us, of all races, muddling around in the genetic middle.

3.

There is a second consideration to keep in mind when we compare blacks and whites. Take the men's hundred-metre final at the Atlanta Olympics. Every runner in that race was of either Western African or Southern African descent, as you would expect if Africans had some genetic affinity for sprinting. But suppose we forget about skin color and look just at country of origin. The eight-man final was made up of two African-Americans, two Africans (one from Namibia and one from Nigeria), a Trinidadian, a Canadian of Jamaican descent, an Englishman of Jamaican descent, and a Jamaican. The race was won by the Jamaican-Canadian, in world-record time, with the Namibian coming in second and the Trinidadian third. The sprint relay-the 4 x 100-was won by a team from Canada, consisting of the Jamaican-Canadian from the final, a Haitian-Canadian, a Trinidadian-Canadian, and another Jamaican-Canadian. Now it appears that African heritage is important as an initial determinant of sprinting ability, but also that the most important advantage of all is some kind of cultural or environmental factor associated with the Caribbean.

Or consider, in a completely different realm, the problem of hypertension. Black Americans have a higher incidence of hypertension than white Americans, even after you control for every conceivable variable, including income, diet, and weight, so it's tempting to conclude that there is something about being of African descent that makes blacks prone to hypertension. But it turns out that although some Caribbean countries have a problem with hypertension, others-Jamaica, St. Kitts, and the Bahamas-don't. It also turns out that people in Liberia and Nigeria-two countries where many New World slaves came from-have similar and perhaps even lower blood-pressure rates than white North Americans, while studies of Zulus, Indians, and whites in Durban, South Africa, showed that urban white males had the highest hypertension rates and urban white females had the lowest. So it's likely that the disease has nothing at all to do with Africanness.

The same is true for the distinctive muscle characteristic observed when Kenyans were compared with Swedes. Saltin, the Swedish physiologist, subsequently found many of the same characteristics in Nordic skiers who train at high altitudes and Nordic runners who train in very hilly regions-conditions, in other words, that resemble the mountainous regions of Kenya's Rift Valley, where so many of the country's distance runners come from. The key factor seems to be Kenya, not genes.

Lots of things that seem to be genetic in origin, then, actually aren't. Similarly, lots of things that we wouldn't normally think might affect athletic ability actually do. Once again, the social-science literature on male and female math achievement is instructive. Psychologists argue that when it comes to subjects like math, boys tend to engage in what's known as ability attribution. A boy who is doing well will attribute his success to the fact that he's good at math, and if he's doing badly he'll blame his teacher or his own lack of motivation-anything but his ability. That makes it easy for him to bounce back from failure or disappointment, and gives him a lot of confidence in the face of a tough new challenge. After all, if you think you do well in math because you're good at math, what's stopping you from being good at, say, algebra, or advanced calculus? On the other hand, if you ask a girl why she is doing well in math she will say, more often than not, that she succeeds because she works hard. If she's doing poorly, she'll say she isn't smart enough. This, as should be obvious, is a self-defeating attitude. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness"-the state in which failure is perceived as insurmountable. Girls who engage in effort attribution learn helplessness because in the face of a more difficult task like algebra or advanced calculus they can conceive of no solution. They're convinced that they can't work harder, because they think they're working as hard as they can, and that they can't rely on their intelligence, because they never thought they were that smart to begin with. In fact, one of the fascinating findings of attribution research is that the smarter girls are, the more likely they are to fall into this trap. High achievers are sometimes the most helpless. Here, surely, is part of the explanation for greater math variability among males. The female math whizzes, the ones who should be competing in the top one and two per cent with their male counterparts, are the ones most often paralyzed by a lack of confidence in their own aptitude. They think they belong only in the intellectual middle.

The striking thing about these descriptions of male and female stereotyping in math, though, is how similar they are to black and white stereotyping in athletics-to the unwritten rules holding that blacks achieve through natural ability and whites through effort. Here's how Sports Illustrated described, in a recent article, the white basketball player Steve Kerr, who plays alongside Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls. According to the magazine, Kerr is a "hard-working overachiever," distinguished by his "work ethic and heady play" and by a shooting style "born of a million practice shots." Bear in mind that Kerr is one of the best shooters in basketball today, and a key player on what is arguably one of the finest basketball teams in history. Bear in mind, too, that there is no evidence that Kerr works any harder than his teammates, least of all Jordan himself, whose work habits are legendary. But you'd never guess that from the article. It concludes, "All over America, whenever quicker, stronger gym rats see Kerr in action, they must wonder, How can that guy be out there instead of me?"

There are real consequences to this stereotyping. As the psychologists Carol Dweck and Barbara Licht write of high- achieving schoolgirls, "[They] may view themselves as so motivated and well disciplined that they cannot entertain the possibility that they did poorly on an academic task because of insufficient effort. Since blaming the teacher would also be out of character, blaming their abilities when they confront difficulty may seem like the most reasonable option." If you substitute the words "white athletes" for "girls" and "coach" for "teacher," I think you have part of the reason that so many white athletes are underrepresented at the highest levels of professional sports. Whites have been saddled with the athletic equivalent of learned helplessness-the idea that it is all but fruitless to try and compete at the highest levels, because they have only effort on their side. The causes of athletic and gender discrimination may be diverse, but its effects are not. Once again, blacks are like boys, and whites are like girls.

4.

When I was in college, I once met an old acquaintance from my high-school running days. Both of us had long since quit track, and we talked about a recurrent fantasy we found we'd both had for getting back into shape. It was that we would go away somewhere remote for a year and do nothing but train, so that when the year was up we might finally know how good we were. Neither of us had any intention of doing this, though, which is why it was a fantasy. In adolescence, athletic excess has a certain appeal-during high school, I happily spent Sunday afternoons running up and down snow-covered sandhills-but with most of us that obsessiveness soon begins to fade. Athletic success depends on having the right genes and on a self-reinforcing belief in one's own ability. But it also depends on a rare form of tunnel vision. To be a great athlete, you have to care, and what was obvious to us both was that neither of us cared anymore. This is the last piece of the puzzle about what we mean when we say one group is better at something than another: sometimes different groups care about different things. Of the seven hundred men who play major-league baseball, for example, eighty-six come from either the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, even though those two islands have a combined population of only eleven million. But then baseball is something that Dominicans and Puerto Ricans care about-and you can say the same thing about African-Americans and basketball, West Indians and sprinting, Canadians and hockey, and Russians and chess. Desire is the great intangible in performance, and unlike genes or psychological affect we can't measure it and trace its implications. This is the problem, in the end, with the question of whether blacks are better at sports than whites. It's not that it's offensive, or that it leads to discrimination. It's that, in some sense, it's not a terribly interesting question; "better" promises a tidier explanation than can ever be provided.

I quit competitive running when I was sixteen-just after the summer I had qualified for the Ontario track team in my age class. Late that August, we had travelled to St. John's, Newfoundland, for the Canadian championships. In those days, I was whippet-thin, as milers often are, five feet six and not much more than a hundred pounds, and I could skim along the ground so lightly that I barely needed to catch my breath. I had two white friends on that team, both distance runners, too, and both, improbably, even smaller and lighter than I was. Every morning, the three of us would run through the streets of St. John's, charging up the hills and flying down the other side. One of these friends went on to have a distinguished college running career, the other became a world-class miler; that summer, I myself was the Canadian record holder in the fifteen hundred metres for my age class. We were almost terrifyingly competitive, without a shred of doubt in our ability, and as we raced along we never stopped talking and joking, just to prove how absurdly easy we found running to be. I thought of us all as equals. Then, on the last day of our stay in St. John's, we ran to the bottom of Signal Hill, which is the town's principal geographical landmark-an abrupt outcrop as steep as anything in San Francisco. We stopped at the base, and the two of them turned to me and announced that we were all going to run straight up Signal Hill backward. I don't know whether I had more running ability than those two or whether my Africanness gave me any genetic advantage over their whiteness. What I do know is that such questions were irrelevant, because, as I realized, they were willing to go to far greater lengths to develop their talent. They ran up the hill backward. I ran home.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

"The environmental crime of the century" - Saddam's ecocide in the Mesopotamian marshes

Update 5/30/2006: According to a report from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the ecology of the Mesopotamian marshes has been recovering to an unexpected degree since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein:

Reflooding of Iraq's destroyed Mesopotamian marshes since 2003 has resulted in a "remarkable rate of reestablishment" of native invertebrates, plants, fish, and birds, according to an article in the June issue of BioScience. Curtis J. Richardson of Duke University and Najah A. Hussain of the University of Basrah, writing about fieldwork conducted over the past two years in four large marshes in southern Iraq, note that water inflow from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has been greater than expected because of record snowpack melts, which has kept salinity levels low. The incoming water quality has been better than predicted, too, with toxin levels lower than had been feared. As a result, many native species have returned, including some rare bird species, although their numbers have not rebounded to historical levels.

Iraq's marshes were devastated in the 1980s and 1990s by the Hussein regime's campaign to ditch, dike, drain, and burn them. Unable to pursue their traditional means of livelihood--fishing, herding water buffalo, and hunting--tens of thousands of Marsh Arabs fled to southern Iran. [....]

Richardson and Hussain are not complacent about the marshes' future, however. The researchers point out that water inflow is unlikely to be sufficient to maintain the encouraging trends in coming years. Fish catches remain poor, which deters many Marsh Arabs from returning to a traditional way of life. [....]

Five thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian marshes, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq, the Sumerians began history. They devised an irrigation system and built an agrarian society, banding together the children of hunter-gatherers in the world's first cities—Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Lagash, Larsa—on the edge of the marshes. From their cradle of civilization, the Sumerians brought forth writing (as well as the wheel, maybe, and much else fundamental) and carved into clay tablets the epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the Flood. Here, many say, was the Garden of Eden (although the latest scientific thinking suggests it was at a spot now at the bottom of the Persian Gulf).

Saddam Hussein drained the Mesopotamian marshes in the 1990s, turning 95 percent of wetlands the size of Massachusetts to desert. At a Boston rally staged by people opposed to the then-looming invasion of Iraq, a small group of otherwise-minded citizens held aloft a sign that read, "Invade Iraq! Save the Garden of Eden."

After the fall of Saddam's regime in April 2003, Marsh Arabs were quick to breach embankments to reflood parts of their homeland. Conference presenter Curtis Richardson made the photograph above that June on his first mission to assess ecological damages. It shows an Iraqi water engineer in the totally dried-out central portion of the once verdant marshes. It does not show the burned-out tanks and other ordnance abundant along the roadways.

Courtesy of Dr. Curtis J. Richardson, Duke University Wetland Center, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences

In addition to their iconic force, Saddam's depredations had immense social and ecological consequences. The marshlands were once the largest wetland ecosystem in western Asia and home to a wonderful diversity of wildlife. Fish for all of Iraq came from the marshes, and fish and shrimp spawned there to populate coastal fisheries in other Gulf states, especially Kuwait. A vast oasis in the desert, the marshes were winter quarters for the Dalmatian pelican, the pygmy cormorant, the white-tailed eagle, and many other migratory birds coming along the intercontinental flyway, an estimated 40 species of them now at risk. Several species of birds, fish, and mammals endemic to the marshes may have recently become extinct. A subspecies of otter is among the creatures believed to have been disappeared by the desertification of its habitat. (Perhaps the most famous of Mesopotamian marsh dwellers was an otter named Mij, who emigrated to Scotland to star in the 1960 book Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, one of the few Westerners to visit the marshes when they flourished.)

When Saddam and his increasingly Sunni-focused regime went after the wetlands, his primary target was its human inhabitants, a quarter of a million or more Marsh Arabs, or Ma'dan, so called—Shi'ites. They lived in watery harmony with their environment, in homes made of reeds on artificial mud-and-reed islands or on the banks of the marshes, as their predecessors had for millennia. With reason, Saddam saw the Marsh Arabs as disloyal, unmanageable, and hard to catch in their refuge of reeds. His efforts to erase them and their habitat began in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War and accelerated following a failed Shi'ite uprising after the Gulf War in 1991. He napalmed their houses, strafed them from helicopters, blew them up, and killed them by the tens of thousands. He slaughtered their water buffalo and cattle, poisoned the water to eradicate the fish, and burned the reed beds. Those marsh dwellers who weren't exterminated were displaced from their homes at gunpoint again and again. Rape and torture were commonplace. Many Marsh Arabs fled to refugee camps in Iran. Today, their population has shrunk to an estimated 80,000.

Saddam said he was trying to increase the amount of dry land available for farming. In addition to eliminating his countrymen, he may have wanted to improve military access to a border area, or develop new oil fields.

This was a "brutal ecocide....purely based on political and military decisions by the previous regime," said Latif Rashid, Iraq's current minister for water resources. It was "a crime against humanity."

It was "an incredible feat from an engineering point of view," said engineer Azzam Alwash, director of the Eden Again Project, and "the environmental crime of the century."

"Genocide," Baroness Emma Nicholson called it, emphatically. She is the chair of AMAR International Charitable Foundation (Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees), which she founded in 1991; a member of the European Parliament; and a former Conservative member of the House of Commons in Britain, awarded a life peerage in 1997. "Saddam Hussein defined the people of the marshlands as lower than animals...as the scum of the earth," she said, and this was "a very deliberate attempt to wipe out the indigenous population."

Rashid, Alwash, and Nicholson were among 40 presenters at "Mesopotamian Marshes and Modern Development: Practical Approaches for Sustaining Restored Ecological and Cultural Landscapes," a three-day conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, held October 28 through 30. Participants spoke not only of the Iraqi marshes, but of wetland projects around the world—the Las Vegas Wash, Coiba National Park in Panama, and the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil, for example—that might inform work in Iraq.

Both the Tigris and Euphrates have their headwaters in Turkey, and Iraq by no means controls how much of their water reaches the Gulf at Basra. The map shows the location of the former marshes. Well before Saddam demolished them, their health was threatened by dams upstream. Prophets have suggested that future wars in this part of the world will concern not oil, but water.

The architect of the conference, which had many Harvard sponsors, was adjunct associate professor of landscape ecology Robert France. Outside sponsors included the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Largely serendipitously, the conference was preceded by a public panel discussion on issues of human rights, development policy, and the challenges of rehabilitating the Iraqi wetlands at the Kennedy School of Government on October 27, organized by the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. Contributing to the full-court press were a lecture on "Preserving Iraq's Antiquities and Cultural Heritage," sponsored by the Semitic Museum later on October 27, and an exhibition, Field Photography: The Marsh Arabs of Iraq, 1934, at the Peabody Museum (see "Measuring the Other").

Baroness Nicholson began visiting the marshes in 1991 and struggled in vain throughout the decade to arouse the international community to help the Marsh Arabs. The "huge volume of money" spent in global public relations by the regime in Baghdad, she said, "swayed the world into thinking that what was happening in the marshlands was either not happening at all despite the evidence, or was being done for beneficent reasons. Well, it was happening, and it was being done for the least beneficent of reasons."

Today, the prospect of rehabilitating the marshes has energized people in many parts of the world. The United States, Canada, Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, and other nations say they will pour millions of dollars into the effort. The United Nations and the World Bank are rallying around, as well as several nongovernmental agencies devoted to the task.

Satellite images from 1983 and 2002 show the effect of Turkey's huge Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates; it has created a lake that covers 320 square miles in total surface area. At opening ceremonies for the dam in 1992, Süleyman Demirel, then president of Turkey, reportedly said, "Neither Syria nor Iraq can lay claim to Turkey's rivers any more than Ankara could claim their oil. This is a matter of sovereignty. We have a right to do anything we like. The water resources are Turkey's, the oil resources are theirs. We don't say we share their oil resources, and they can't say they share our water resources."

NASA / The Earth Observatory

The locals leapt to action fast. Saddam's undeniably clever engineers had built a system of dams, barrages, and rivers to drain the marshes, including a 350-mile-long canal called the "Saddam River," the "Mother of Battles River," the "Prosperity River,"and the "Fidelity to the Leader Canal." Only a bit of flourishing marsh straddling the Iraq-Iran border survived. "Following the liberation of Iraq, the people took things into their own hands," said Alwash, who grew up near the marshes, fled Saddam's regime to the United States, earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering, worked as an engineering consultant for 20 years in California, and has now returned to Iraq to help do the hands-on work of restoration. "They started breaking the embankments as of the second week of April 2003. They could not wait." The action was haphazard and the resulting reflooded areas fragmented. The Ministry of Water Resources itself sanctioned the release of some water. A three-year natural drought ended last year, bringing further relief. Today, about 20 percent of the original marsh area has been reinundated.

"But is that restoration?" asked Curtis Richardson, director of the Duke University Wetland Center and professor of resource ecology at Duke. He is part of the USAID team developing a plan for the management of the marsh area, one of four plans in preparation, and has conducted extensive studies of the marshes today. "Areas have been reflooded," he said, "but are they the right areas? Is the water of good quality?"

Both the Tigris and the Euphrates are open sewers. The former marshes did a competent job of cleaning the water that flowed slowly through them on its way to Basra and the Gulf, but that system is largely broken. The salinity of the water entering and in the marshes is also a major problem now; the Euphrates is especially salty. Restoring to verdancy thousands of square miles of dry, cracked, mud flats, heavily contaminated with salt and pesticides, "isn't rocket science," Richardson observed. "It's far more complex."

In some of the reflooded areas, what may accurately be called restoration is occurring, he said. Marsh vegetation is growing again and some birds and fish have returned. "Historically, there were in the neighborhood of 40 plant species in the Mesopotamian marshes," Richardson reported. "The reflooded areas have only 12 in some places, but more in others. Fish species used to number about 22 and are now about half that. The fish are only half their former size but may grow larger with time. Bird species in summer are close to historic numbers. We don't know yet what they will be in winter, or about the rare species." (Canada is paying for a bird count this winter.)

In other reflooded areas, the geochemistry of the soil had changed so much during a decade of desiccation, and salinity and toxicity had become so high, that the lands should not have been reflooded. The result has been not living marsh but dead pond, with half the salinity of the sea. The present situation overall suggests to Richardson that 15 percent to 30 percent of the former marshes could be restored—and more if more water were available. His most important ecological message is that whatever water does come to the marshes must flow.

----------Satellite images record the Mesopotamian landscape during the past three decades: verdant in 1977, desert in 2002, and partly reinundated in 2004. Leal Mertes, professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a panelist at the Kennedy School discussion, explained some of the technology underlying the use of remote sensing for such analyses. Here, each image is rendered in colors of yellow-orange for the desert, bright blue for open water, and gradations of cyan to green for different types of flooded vegetation, based on a statistical image-processing technique known as spectral unmixing.

Courtesy of Leal Mertes

There is nothing new about using water as a weapon of war. The Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians did it. The Dutch did it. Others too. "The Mesopotamian wetlands are the oldest manipulated landscape on the face of the earth," said Robert France. "The word 'natural' applied to them is a complete oxymoron." To be able to farm, the Sumerians were obliged to learn how to divert water out of the rivers onto their crops, and thus they also learned to manipulate rivers to starve neighboring city-states or flood cities they wished to drown.

In fairness to Saddam, one must acknowledge, also, that he was not the first to think of draining these marshes. "He was using detailed engineering plans laid out by the Brits in the 1950s but never acted upon," said France. The British apparently felt the marshes were a home to disease, a public-health hazard.

Moreover, outrage at the draining of marshes is in ways hypocritical, France asserted. "We have a war against wetlands. We drain them all over." Even our language is pejorative toward wetlands, he pointed out. "We ask, Are you mired in your work? Do you get bogged down with details? Are you swamped with assignments?" Of military engagements, in Vietnam, in Iraq, we speak of quagmires. "It took 50 years to destroy 95 percent of the wetlands in California," restoration ecologist Michelle Stevens, of the University of Miami and a presenter at the conference, has been quoted as saying elsewhere. What was spectacular about Saddam's work was that "it took only about two years to obliterate the Mesopotamian marshes."

The marsh dwellers' slough of despond was foretold years ago by the British explorer and travel writer Wilfred Thesiger in his book The Marsh Arabs, published in 1964. Thesiger lived for long periods in the marshes in the 1950s, one of very few Westerners ever to have wished to do such a thing. He gave Mij, the otter, to his friend Gavin Maxwell. "Soon," he wrote, "the Marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear."

Even without Saddam or any plan to drain them, the marshes might have died as an unanticipated consequence of the building of dams, which began blamelessly in Iraq in the 1950s. At that time the country's biggest water problem was too much of it in springtime, and the government built dams on the Tigris and Euphrates to permit an even, measured flow of water along their courses to protect towns from flooding. "Snow in the high mountains of Iran and Turkey melts in February through May," said Alwash, "and we had this pulse of fresh, sweet water laden with sediment that got deposited in the marshes and flushed away the brackish water accumulated over the course of the previous year through evaporation." "The marshes get only four inches of rainfall annually, but more than 100 inches of water evaporates," said Richardson. The reduction makes a salty sauce. "There would have been no Garden of Eden, there would have been no Sumerian culture," he pointed out, "were it not for the amount of fresh water coming down into the region from outside the country." "The whole system needs a periodic flood," said Alwash. "Unfortunately, due to the building of dams, we no longer have these floods. One of the important aspects of the restoration of the marshes is going to be the creation of a mechanical flood, as it were. We need to complete computer modeling of the marsh hydrology so that we can simulate water flow and learn how to channel enough water to create a flood."

Kingship, as well as cities, first emerged in the ancient world in Sumer. In the twenty-fifth century B.C., the marshy city-state of Lagash was one of the largest and most powerful in Sumer, and Ur-Nanshe, depicted here in an alabaster peg-figurine, was its king. "A peg-figurine like this would have been buried under a temple as a foundation deposit—equivalent to a modern cornerstone," says James Armstrong, assistant curator of collections at Harvard's Semitic Museum, where the king now sits.

Figurine photograph by Jim Harrison

How big a flood could it be? There are 36 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, said France, but the most troublesome obstruction is in Turkey—the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates River and its jumbo reservoir—part of Turkey's GAP project. That transformative project aims eventually to build 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Euphrates and Tigris and their tributaries to generate power and to irrigate 19 percent of the economically irrigable land in Turkey.

Here's the parching reality. According to Richardson, 88 percent of the water in the Euphrates River is controlled by Turkey, 9 percent by Syria, and only a piddling 3 percent by Iraq. Of the Tigris, 56 percent flows from Turkey, 12 percent from Iran, and 32 percent from the watersheds of Iraq. "Right now the flows coming into Iraq are about a third to a half what they were 12 years ago, before Turkey put in dams, and the water quality is much poorer," said Edwin Theriot, director of the environmental laboratory of the Army Corps of Engineers, who has recently served as senior adviser to the Iraqi minister for water resources. "If Turkey implements all of its irrigation projects, it would bring the Tigris to a drip." "We were water-rich," said Alwash, "but after the GAP project was built, we suddenly became a water-poor country." Said Minister Rashid, "So far, we do not have any proper agreements with our neighboring countries regarding fair or a just distribution of water."

"You can't have wetlands without water," said Peter Rogers, McKay professor of environmental engineering and professor of city and regional planning, a participant in the Kennedy School discussion. "The Turks have built an expensive dam, and you expect them to use it. The big question is what happens if irrigation is developed in Turkey. Then there will be no water even for the reflooded marshes that we could restore....In my opinion," said Rogers, "the marshes have gone. You'll see some small remnants, maybe like zoos, but certainly there is not going to be the water for major restoration." Moreover, he believes "there's no rhyme nor reason why Iraq should be in irrigated agriculture," using scarce water to grow crops that could be readily produced in rainier parts of the world. "I'm fairly pessimistic about the marshes," he said, "but optimistic about the future of Iraq if they can mobilize their massive mineral resources, mainly hydrocarbons. You can buy a lot with oil."

Countering that assessment was conference presenter Stuart Leiderman, who has written, "Those who are charged with rebuilding Iraq and with redressing the violations of human rights within that beleaguered nation need to recognize that reflooding the marshes is a fundamental imperative." Leiderman is an independent scholar and activist whose recent work has concerned the plight of environmental refugees. "Remnants of the Marsh culture should not be abandoned as a lost people, nor should their homeland be left as desiccated wastes for oil, agribusiness, and other business interests to develop at will."

"Some of the surveys of refugees living in camps in Iran have shown that if you ask them, 'Would you come back?' many say, 'No. Life is just as good in this horrible refugee camp at it was in the marshes,'" said France in an interview before the conference. "We mustn't romanticize their old way of life. We mustn't want people to live in a museum to benefit ecotourism. Since Saddam drained the marshes, people have been doing dry-land agriculture, and as hard as that is, it was worse in the marshes. So they say, fine, bring back the marshes, but dont do it where I've been farming for a decade. Some of these people do want to get back and live on their artificial islands in the middle of the marsh, but they want Internet access. And of course they want, and are entitled to, good healthcare. And education, and roads, and proper wastewater disposal. That's why development is a theme of this conference."

"You have seen the marshes in their glory. But you also saw some of the poorest people in the world," said Edwin Theriot, referring to a display of photographs by Nik Wheeler of the marshes in the 1970s. "We want to recreate that glorious marsh, to reconstruct that ecosystem, but we need to reconstruct the culture in a way that provides the people the basic resources they need." It is a tremendously complex problem we're asking a fledgling, interim government to wrestle with, he said.

Earlier in the week of the Harvard conference, Theriot reported, Iraq's ministers of water resources, environment, and municipality and public works had met for two days in Venice with representatives of the several donor nations and had agreed how to proceed administratively. There will be a second meeting of the council of ministers soon and another donors conference, in Japan; the four existing proposed plans for the marshes will be synthesized into a single, Iraqi plan, which the ministers will ratify; an international committee of experts will be organized to provide counsel to Iraq; and a master plan for the marshes should be finalized in June.

Alwash has a thought about how to resolve that problem with Turkey. "Let's be honest," he said. "The water Turkey is holding behind their dams has nothing to do with irrigation. They want to exchange water for oil. However, no Iraqi government will be able to survive if they ever sell the historic right of Iraq—as documented by clay tablets from 3,000 B.C.—to the water of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Therefore, we're going to have to achieve a win-win solution by thinking outside the box. If Iraq and Turkey get into negotiating positions that lock them into their God-given rights, we will have a situation similar to that between the Palestinians and Israelis. Fifty years from now, Iraq will be dying of thirst, Turkey will be dying of a failed economy, and we'll still be negotiating. What I suggest is this. Iraq needs electricity. We suffer in Baghdad 10 hours of cut-off electricity each day in the summer, and God help you if you don't have a generator at 2 o'clock in the afternoon in July. Iraq's generating capacity at this point is about 5,600 megawatts. The need is for about 12,000, and that's without accounting for a potential increase in demand. We will have to buy electricity. I suggest to you that if Iraq buys electricity from Turkey, the by-product of that is that Turkey will have to release some water to do hydroelectric power generation. Water comes Iraq's way, and we bypass this hot potato. We did not sell our water rights, ladies and gentlemen, we actually bought electricity.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

The Election Results In Iraq (Normblog)

Guest-posted on the weblog of Norman Geras (Normblog)February 13, 2005

The election results in Iraq(by Jeff Weintraub)

On first impression, the latest news about the Iraqi election returns has confirmed my most optimistic hopes. Granted, my expectations weren't very high, but things could have turned out a lot worse.

The so-called Sistani list, including the main Shia religious parties, came in first, as expected. But not only did they fail to get the two-thirds majority they would have needed to form a government entirely by themselves, but it appears that they just missed getting a simple majority. Furthermore, the strategy of the two main Kurdish parties (KDP and PUK), and the popular support they were able to mobilize (not just in Kurdistan, but among Kurds elsewhere in Iraq), may turn out to be quite important in shaping the overall results of the election - which would definitely be a good thing.

It seems that the Allawi list didn't get enough votes to come out ahead (which would have been unfortunate, in my opinion) but did get enough votes to prevent a total landslide for the Sistani list. So the latter will have to put together a coalition in order to form a transitional government (which, according to the rules, requires more than a simple majority). And for various reasons, including the prominent role of Chalabi - coalition-builder extraordinaire - in the Sistani list, there are good prospects that they could form a coalition with the Kurdish parties (a strategy urged, convincingly in my view, by Kurdophile analysts of Iraqi politics like Brendan O'Leary). If so, this would be a Very Good Thing, since the Kurdish parties happen to be the most pro-democratic, anti-theocratic, pro-feminist, experienced, responsible, (relatively) clean, and politically skilled of all the major forces on the Iraqi political scene.

All this is still hypothetical, of course. Actually, what happens next will depend to a great extent on two factors that remain uncertain: (1) The political skill, effectiveness, and moderation of the Iraqi Shiite leadership, political and religious. And (2) whether or not, and to what extent, the central axis of Iraqi politics now comes to be shaped by an effective coalition between Shiite Arabs and Kurds (which, among other things, would also strengthen those tendencies in Iraqi Shiite politics that are least theocratic and least tied to Iran). It may be that both of these factors will turn out badly, but at the moment it doesn't appear to be inevitable.

And if the self-marginalization of the Sunni Arabs helps lead to a durable Shiite-Kurd coalition, then that opens up some hopeful possibilities with regard to the Sunni Arab minority as well, which might partly counterbalance the many mistakes of the US occupation so far. Several recent analyses of the so-called Iraqi 'insurgency' (including those by anti-war people like Seymour Hersh, as well as informed and ambivalent analysts like Juan Cole) suggest that these 'insurgents' resemble the ultra-right diehards of the Secret Army Organization in French Algeria a lot more than the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. They can cause a lot of trouble, but their potential mass base is inherently limited to 15-20% of the population, and their 'programme' is not only rejected but feared and hated by over 80% of the population. Furthermore (as in the case of the SAO), their tactics only increase the extent to which the vast majority of the country turns against them. For example, in April 2004 a lot of non-Sunni Iraqi Arabs were upset by the US assault on Fallujah, which helped provoke the disastrous decision to end it half-way; it was probably a mistake to launch the assault, but once they started it, they should have finished it. In November 2004, the vast majority of non-Sunni Arabs either applauded the new US assault or just kept quiet. As Juan Cole pointed out at the time, 'the silence of the Shiites was thunderous'. So if the 'insurgents' can't panic the US into simply pulling out, and if any half-way effective government representing the other 80-85% of the population manages to emerge, they can ultimately be isolated and crushed. Meanwhile, all the major Kurdish and Shia political tendencies seem committed, at least to some degree, to reaching out to non-fascist elements in the Sunni Arab political leadership and elites (if only because they recognize what eastern Europeans used to call, euphemistically, 'geopolitical realities').

These are all big ifs, of course. Instead, it is conceivable that everything could go wrong and we could see the emergence of some sort of mega-Lebanon (with the Sunni Arabs and the 'insurgents', as Juan Cole points out, playing the role of the Maronites and the Phalangists).

But, overall, the results and implications of the elections continue to look promising - in the circumstances, which are pretty unpromising. Successfully holding the election was itself a remarkable triumph (under the circumstances); and the results give the Iraqis just about the best possible chance they could have gotten to put together a decently acceptable political future for the country - if they don't blow it, of course.

Jeff Weintraub, analyzing the results, suggests that "On first impression, the latest news about the Iraqi election returns has confirmed my most optimistic hopes." Juan Cole, looking at the same numbers, concludes, "[current Prime Minister Iyad] Allawi's defeat... is a huge defeat for the Bush administration, though it will not be reported that way in the corporate media."

UPDATE: Robin Wright has an odd news analysis piece in the Washington Post today. It's odd becuse the headline reads, "Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision" -- and the piece consists of expert quotes (including Cole) making this point. However, in the 16th paragraph there's this casual admission that, "U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq is not likely to become an Iranian surrogate." I'll have more to say about the question of Iran's influence in Iraq sometime this week.

Meanwhile, Weintraub e-mails the following:

[W]hat [Cole] says in this particular quotation is not incompatible with what I said. Holding the elections now was not the preferred outcome for the Bush administration, and the results of the election are probably not their preferred outcome, either. But as one Iraqi put it (addressing people whose positions on Iraq are simply a function of whether they like or hate the Bush administration): "It's not all about you."

Also, the fact that some people in the US government would have preferred to see a victory for the Allawi list--which is plausible--doesn't necessarily mean that, in objective terms, this would actually have been the best outcome for long-term US interests in Iraq.

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Darfur - Mass murder continues unchecked (Daily Telegraph)

Daily Telegraph:

It is probably true to say that the [Sudanese] government did not embark on operations in the western region with the intention of eliminating its sedentary population.

It was, rather, doing what it has done in many other parts of the country: seeking to crush an insurgency through terror tactics. Yet each day the line between that brutal campaign and genocide becomes thinner. Despite numerous appeals for peace, Khartoum is stepping up an offensive aimed not so much at the two rebel groups as the civilian population. Studying data from various sources, Jan Coebergh, a doctor who has worked in Darfur, estimates that the death toll there is about 300,000, well above the commonly quoted figure of 70,000. Whatever the truth, the escalation of the conflict is rapidly pushing up the total. Sudan's Islamist government may not have sized up its victims with the same chilling method displayed by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, but that is a distinction likely to be lost on those in Darfur subjected to bombing, murder, rape and loot.

Likewise, the disagreement over what constitutes genocide seems academic in the absence of effective outside intervention. It is piously said that this is a problem for Africa to sort out. Yet the African Union force in Darfur is both tardy in deployment and ill equipped to bring order to such a vast area. Western logistical help is overdue. Beyond that, the enforcement of a no-fly zone and the dispatch of a small ground force under a UN mandate should be enough to blunt Khartoum's offensive.

Africa Action:

Salih Booker, Executive Director of Africa Action, said this morning, "The UN Commission Report masks the truth and contradicts itself. It concludes that the Sudanese government "has not pursued a policy of genocide", while it admits that the government and its militias are responsible for widespread and systematic crimes against civilians, which "may be no less serious and heinous than genocide." In effect, it is punting to the International Criminal Court, which it says should make a determination on genocidal intent. Just as happened in Rwanda a decade ago, the international community is splitting hairs as a genocide unfolds in Africa." [....]

As the UN Report recommends that the International Criminal Court be invited to pursue the prosecution of those suspected of war crimes in Darfur, and as the U.S. proposes the creation of a new and separate tribunal in Tanzania, Colgan warned this morning, "This debate over the location and composition of a war crimes tribunal for Darfur diverts attention from the immediate priority, which must be ending the ongoing genocide. It is certainly important to ensure that those responsible are held accountable and brought to justice for their crimes, but people are still dying in Darfur at a rate estimated to be 35,000 deaths per month, and ending this violence must be the first order of business for the international community."

Sudan's shameThe American Congress and State Department and the European Parliament have declared that the Sudanese government's military campaign in Darfur amounts to genocide. The United Nations begs to disagree, accusing Khartoum and its allied militias of atrocities that fall short of that crime as defined by the 1948 convention. It is probably true to say that the government did not embark on operations in the western region with the intention of eliminating its sedentary population.

It was, rather, doing what it has done in many other parts of the country: seeking to crush an insurgency through terror tactics. Yet each day the line between that brutal campaign and genocide becomes thinner. Despite numerous appeals for peace, Khartoum is stepping up an offensive aimed not so much at the two rebel groups as the civilian population. Studying data from various sources, Jan Coebergh, a doctor who has worked in Darfur, estimates that the death toll there is about 300,000, well above the commonly quoted figure of 70,000. Whatever the truth, the escalation of the conflict is rapidly pushing up the total. Sudan's Islamist government may not have sized up its victims with the same chilling method displayed by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, but that is a distinction likely to be lost on those in Darfur subjected to bombing, murder, rape and loot.

Likewise, the disagreement over what constitutes genocide seems academic in the absence of effective outside intervention. It is piously said that this is a problem for Africa to sort out. Yet the African Union force in Darfur is both tardy in deployment and ill equipped to bring order to such a vast area. Western logistical help is overdue. Beyond that, the enforcement of a no-fly zone and the dispatch of a small ground force under a UN mandate should be enough to blunt Khartoum's offensive.

That is not happening because Darfur is regarded as a sideshow to the north-south peace agreement between Khartoum and Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army, which was signed in January and ratified by the Sudanese parliament yesterday. Yet what confidence can there be that a government oblivious to outside appeals over Darfur will not renege on its agreements with the south? The truth is that Omar al-Bashir's National Congress is determined to crush any form of dissent. In a country of such political, ethnic and religious diversity, that is no recipe for long-term stability.

Africa Action Rejects Conclusion of UN Report on Darfur

Urges Immediate Action to Address Ongoing Atrocities against Civilians;Warns Against Shift of Focus to Debate over Tribunals while Genocide Continues

Tuesday, February 1, 2005 (Washington, DC) - Africa Action today rejected the conclusion of a United Nations (UN) Special Commission report, which this week declares that a pattern of government-sponsored killings, displacement and other forms of violence in Darfur, Sudan, does not constitute genocide. The report, which acknowledges that abuses carried out by government and militia forces in Darfur may constitute "crimes against humanity", comes just one week after UN and African Union (AU) troops confirmed new attacks against civilians by the Sudanese Air Force, killing at least 105 people, most of these women and children.

Salih Booker, Executive Director of Africa Action, said this morning, "The UN Commission Report masks the truth and contradicts itself. It concludes that the Sudanese government "has not pursued a policy of genocide", while it admits that the government and its militias are responsible for widespread and systematic crimes against civilians, which "may be no less serious and heinous than genocide." In effect, it is punting to the International Criminal Court, which it says should make a determination on genocidal intent. Just as happened in Rwanda a decade ago, the international community is splitting hairs as a genocide unfolds in Africa."

Africa Action notes that the genocidal intent of the Sudanese government is clear from extensive documentary evidence gathered by human rights groups, as well as by the U.S. government in its earlier investigation. Moreover, international legal precedent holds that genocidal intent can be inferred from the context and pattern of abuses when they are systematically directed against a group. The UN report finds that "the vast majority of the victims of these violations have been from the Fur, Zaghawa, Massalit" and other ethnic groups in Darfur.

Ann-Louise Colgan, Director of Policy Analysis and Communications at Africa Action, stated that, "The UN report confirms the gravity of crimes perpetrated by the government and militias in Darfur, and must make it all the more urgent for the international community to act immediately to stop the violence. As the government-sponsored killings, rapes, displacements and destruction of villages continues, the top priority must be to take action to provide protection to the displaced and vulnerable communities of Darfur."

As the UN Report recommends that the International Criminal Court be invited to pursue the prosecution of those suspected of war crimes in Darfur, and as the U.S. proposes the creation of a new and separate tribunal in Tanzania, Colgan warned this morning, "This debate over the location and composition of a war crimes tribunal for Darfur diverts attention from the immediate priority, which must be ending the ongoing genocide. It is certainly important to ensure that those responsible are held accountable and brought to justice for their crimes, but people are still dying in Darfur at a rate estimated to be 35,000 deaths per month, and ending this violence must be the first order of business for the international community."

Booker added, "Just one week after UN ceremonies commemorated the Holocaust, the international community must respond to the ongoing crisis in Darfur with the urgency that it requires. The U.S. declared five months ago that genocide is happening in Darfur, but it has failed to live up to the obligation this carries. The UN this week has failed to act again. This is not the first time that the U.S. and the international community have failed the victims of genocide in Africa. Nor is it the first time that the government in Khartoum has pursued genocide as a preferred method of counterinsurgency."

Africa Action notes the Security Council will this week consider the UN Commission report, and will debate possible sanctions or other punitive measures. But Booker emphasizes, "International leadership is still missing to stop a genocide that has already killed 400,000 Sudanese and that still continues."

Africa Action today reiterated its call on the U.S. to do everything necessary to secure a UN Security Council Resolution invoking Chapter 7, which would authorize a multinational intervention force to stop the genocide in Darfur. Africa Action calls on the Security Council to: (1) Provide the African Union force with a Chapter 7 mandate under the UN Charter to protect the civilians of Darfur and to enforce a cease-fire; (2) Expand this force by soliciting military personnel and logistical, communications & financial support from UN member nations to form a UN peacekeeping operation to incorporate and support the AU troops under Chapter 7; (3) Enforce the no-fly zone over Darfur; (4) Impose an immediate arms embargo on the government of Sudan

The UN Commission Report released this week was requested by Secretary General Kofi Annan last October to investigate whether acts of genocide had occurred in the Darfur region of Sudan. The question of international action on the ongoing genocide in Darfur is also dealt with in Africa Action’s new "Africa Policy Outlook 2005", available at http://www.africaaction.org/

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research.. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and is currently a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)